Okkervil River Announce New Album, Share Single ‘Don’t Move Back to L.A.’

Post navigation

Ninth studio album In the Rainbow Rain on April 27

Okkervil Record are set to release a follow-up to 2016’s Away, with In The Rainbow Rain slated for an April 27 release. The forthcoming record is being called “a startling left turn” from its predecessor. Frontman Will Sheff has crafted an album brimming with hope. The first single, “Don’t Move Back to L.A.,” makes good on that promise.

“I wanted to make a record where a sense of kindness felt encoded into the music,” Sheff said. Check out “Don’t Move Back to L.A.” below.

“This song had a very straightforward impulse behind it: a bunch of my best friends all moved to LA and I was really sad about it so I wrote a song about how I didn’t want them to leave,” Sheff said in a release. “I’m specifically referring to them through some of the nicknames in the song. I think the song is also kind of about my own deep and long-held desire to get the hell out of New York City, which for years I felt was suffocating me but which I couldn’t manage to leave. I’d like to think that this song is also about how when people fly out of their original towns for big media cities they forfeit the chance to stay in their smaller towns and make them better, and then you end up with a world where there are big slick cities and bitter and brain-drained small towns and not a lot in between.”